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MobOps

Saarang 2010. Annual cultural festival of IIT Madras. As someone who has been constantly visiting websites related to IIT Madras from my 9 th standard, I was very fortunate and deeply honoured to head a team that developed one of the websites which I used to visit in my high school. To say the least, it was fun and extremely gratifying to play my part in the organization of a mammoth festival of the scale of Saarang. The part I was handling, is fondly known as WebOps (officially rechristened as Web & Mobile Applications). Our team, basically, deals with building and maintaining the website and various other internal and external portals. We also develop the mobile applications based on JAVA. I was extremely fortunate to have a like minded and hard working friend as my co-core. We were blessed with a talented team willing to learn,innovate and implement the various ideas which we had.

The building of main website got valuable inputs and help from the famed design team. Saarang 2009 had proved the advantages of having a Design core with webops background. This time also we certify that we can do wonders on the website with help from a good design team. Apart from the website, we handle the numerous portals for various departments like hospitality, even registrations, facilities and finance. I am sure the coordinators learnt a great deal in the art of website design and writing bug free codes.

Saarang 2009 saw the introduction of a full fledged JAVA mobile application complete with schedule, coordinator information and a fairly interactive map. In Saarang 2010, our mobile applications team left no stone unturned in making a brilliant, all encompassing mobile application. The numerous additions to the application this year includes a mobile quiz, which received tremendous participation and was lapped up by the users, a fully interactive map of the festive area with current and upcoming events shown. Features to message, in addition to call, all the people behind Saarang 2010 was added. Portability across phones was ensured and 4 different versions of the app was released to cater to different versions of phones. The mobile team has surpassed levels and we need to look forward to what the next years boys come out with to better our work. Another major attraction this Saarang was the introduction of Bluetooth proximity marketing. The entire Saarang festive area was bluetooth enabled. We sent out the mobile application, mobile themes, wallpapers, news updates, ringtones and ad-campaigns of sponsors. The bluetooth initiative was well received by the crowd as our bluetooth servers catered to over 10000+ downloads with peak traffic coming from OAT and grub stalls.